Monitoring the health of your Rails app often involves more than just checking the heartbeat, and that’s where the Health Monitor gem, by Blythe Dunham, comes in handy. Health Monitor is useful for monitoring the more intricate machinery in your app.

The goal of Magnus Holm's Temple project is to create a system of parsers, filters, and generators that work together to build an abstract engine for compiling templates to pure ruby. Magnus postulates that any template consists of three basic elements; Static Text, Dynamic Text, and Blocks which may change the control flow, and uses this theory to create an abstract template compiler.

Bryan Goines has released Rack-Jekyll, which allows you to easily transform your Jekyll pages into a Rack app. If you’re using Heroku and you want to use Jekyll, utilizing it as a Rack application makes deployment a lot easier.

The Temping gem offers an easy way to define an ActiveRecord model on the fly. You can specify the columns inline with any validations, associations, or custom methods you wanted to include in your temporary model. This is useful if you need ActiveRecord models for tests, but do not have them as concrete models in your application.

The Statistics gem for ActiveRecord from Alex Catighera, allows you to define certain statistics on your Activerecord models. These named statistics can be sums, counts, and averages over your models. It creates methods on the class level, so you can easily calculate your desired stats.

Tile, Rango, and Flotomatic are all covered in today's episode. We also have some version string tools and a recap of RubyConf. Then we rock out to a song about the mountain of woes that is developing for IE.